U.S. Representative Seth Moulton (D-Salem) is not happy with what’s been going on in Afghanistan.
As U.S. troops have mostly withdrawn from Afghanistan under the direction of President Joe Biden’s administration, the Taliban made immense gains in the country in the span of a few days. On Sunday, August 15, the Taliban captured Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and reports say that the Taliban is preparing to rule the country once again, as it did from 1996 to 2001.
Moulton, a U.S. Marine veteran who did four tours in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, issued a lengthy statement on the matter.
Moulton criticized President Biden’s administration’s handling of the withdrawal.
“To say that today is anything short of a disaster would be dishonest,” Moulton said. “Worse, it was avoidable. The time to debate whether we stay in Afghanistan has passed, but there is still time to debate how we manage our retreat. For months, I have been calling on the Administration to evacuate our allies immediately — not to wait for paperwork, for shaky agreements with third countries, or for time to make it look more ‘orderly’.”
“While I am proud that a strong, bipartisan majority in Congress voted to expand the Special Immigrant Visa program in support of our Afghan friends, my worst fear has become realized: That ultimately this effort would distract from what is truly needed, an immediate evacuation,” he added. “The fact that, at this hour, we have not even secured the civilian half of Kabul Airport is testament to our moral and operational failure. We need to rectify this immediately. America and our allies must drop the onerous visa requirements where a typo can condemn an ally to torture and death, and the military must continue the evacuation for as long as it takes.”
Moulton also critiqued the Trump administration for negotiating last year a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, whom he called “terrorists.” Moulton said that Trump did it “to meet a campaign promise.”
Moulton also said that he hopes the apparent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban serves “as a wakeup call to Congress,” saying that Congress has the constitutional authority when it comes to sending troops to war. He said that Congress should be ashamed that it failed to hold votes to reauthorize this war over the past 20 years.
Article I Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war.
Moulton concluded his statement by addressing the Americans who served and the sacrifices they made in Afghanistan during the past 20 years:
Finally, to our Afghanistan veterans and their families, I am too honest to stand here today and try to convince you that your sacrifice was worth it. Some will find solace in the millions of Afghans, especially women and girls, to whom we gave two decades of a taste of freedom — more hope, liberty, and opportunity than they would have ever had without the tireless work and irreparable sacrifices of our troops. We accomplished our initial mission: Osama Bin Laden is dead and the threat of terrorist attacks against Americans originating from Afghanistan is diminished. We also provided the security needed to accomplish a peace process that, unfortunately, was never realized.
Others will forever ask that haunting question I heard too often from my own Marines in Iraq: “Why are we here?” The best answer I could ever come up with was simply, “So nobody has to be here in our place,” and while that was never an adequate answer, it is true. And I remain proud to be from a nation whose brave young men and women stand on the ramparts of freedom around the globe, as they do at Kabul Airport tonight.
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